r/photojournalism

Some of my photos from the Whistler Magazine, the resort magazine that goes into all the hotel rooms. https://davidbuzzard.com/whistler-magazine-photos-w25-and-s26/

Hi! I am a photojournalist from Norway. For the last six months (maybe longer, don't exactly remember), I've been working on an app (vibe-coding) to solve what I consider workflow issues with Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge when it comes to enter metadata.

The app is called Aagedal Photo Agent.

The problem with previous apps is that Adobe Bridge doesn't support metadata variables, which makes entering proper archival metadata slow. Photo Mechanic has been the king here, but it isn't very user friendly for non-tech people. Essentially its fantastic efficiency tools become too complicated for many people to use.

What I've attempted to do with Aagedal Photo Agent is to get the simplicity of Adobe Bridge (and possibly even Apple Photos), with a lot of, but not all, the power of Photo Mechanic. Like metadata variables, structured keyword lists, reverse Geocoding.

At the same time I felt that both of these tools lacked the power of modern AI tools. NOT for editing the image, but for assisting in writing metadata. That's why Aagedal Photo Agent includes a per folder face grouping feature, with an optional global face database. This makes it much faster to tag Person Shown IPTC metadata.
I also really liked the idea of structured keywords, so much so that I also added structured People Names, for including both legal name and artist name as a synonym. Both Person Shown and the Keywords metadata field will automatically suggest keywords/names as you write, and if you select a structured keyword the entire keyword tree will be added, like in Photo Mechanic.
Note that not all IPTC metadata fields are supported. Currently only what my close collegues considers essential + a few more.

You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to templates, so that Control + 1 could be your news preset. Control + 2 could be your sports preset. Control + 3 could be your private photos preset. Applied to the selected photos.

The app also comes with some basic editing tools. WB, Tint, Exposure, Contrast, Curves, Saturation, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. And only a basic ellipse mask for secondary adjustments. We are photojournalists after all, and shouldn't change the image too much anyway. It is supposed to be fast and only include what I feel are essential... well, essential + some niche features that I just wanted to have, like HDR image editing, scopes: waveform, parade, vectorscope. Histogram is not included because I personally think it is a stupid scope. (Waveform basically tells you the same, but also a lot more with more precision.)

If you don't like my editing tools you can change to open photos in an external editor instead, and only use this app for metadata.

Again, the app is free and open source. Written in Swift with some Metal shaders. Not even asking for donations (at least not currently). Sharing because in a world being filled with AI images, we need better and more accessible tools do document real photos from real events.

NOTE: Photo Mechanic is still a great tool and will probably still be the best tool for many use cases. Both Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge has been tested by professional users for many years. While I am a professional and I've begun replacing Photo Mechanic + Photoshop with Aagedal Photo Agent, I am only one person and have limited time for testing different scenarios. While it has worked great for me, there may be other workflows that will break something. I will continue to test and update the app, as there are more improvements I want to add, to ease my own work, but progress will be inconsistent. And there is no warranty here.